A Travel Report
“ (…) in my days there are beetles/a dream of stardom, the city of Nanjing/and a pair of hands to bury the ruins.” Shi Tao, a journalist, writer and poet, was sentenced to imprisonment for 10 years in 2005 for releasing a document of the Communist Party to an overseas Chinese democracy site after Yahoo! China provided his personal details to the Chinese government. How does the imprisoned travel? What’s his community? Tao reports from a half-buried landscape.
Photo: JuniperPhoton/Unsplash
Taiyuan
the city of sunset, the city of Tang poetry
carrying a ticket
issued by Chang An Station of the Empire
I stepped into another dark castle
the sunset is not yesterday’s
sunset, though the Tang poetry is still recited
but you have to take a lift
rocketing up to the top of a fake ancient tower
to the vast groups of people
shouting a loud “Good”
otherwise…
there would be a piece of brick coating
spilling off from the ancient city walls
smashing grey imprints onto your body
to make you remember lifelong
the taste of cultural violence
Yinchuan
sunflower, the fruit of autumn
you introduced one line of a poem
into the tomb of poet Hai Zi
just as within the church of a fairytale
among the groups of people, one pair of eyes
is making pilgrimage to another pair of eyes
tonight, the silent sky
will be with me, together
to mourn a deceased, beloved person
Shanghai
from the eyes of a clown, I
entered a palace of human bodies
withered grass in silence, salt of the desires
the streets cooled down
from the fever of the season
from a thick art magazine, I
reached long-dreamed-of Shanghai
where graffiti in dreams
had turned into landscapes in everyone’s booklet
I used poems to write a six-year-long
travel report. several years later
I forced myself into
a stock house of memories,
“private, repeated and lengthy”
just like a bee yenning to share the happiness of an elephant
Nanjing
worn-out days are like the fallen ancient city
the fragrance of withered weeds on the city walls
also envies my fully soaked nostalgia
my story
once touched a lengthy dark night
silent passion disheartened by the cap of an opened wine bottle
in my days there are beetles
a dream of stardom, the city of Nanjing
and a pair of hands to bury the ruins
Original texts in Chinese can be found here
(Translated by Chen Biao)
Photo: Weiye Tan/Unsplash